“Learn to Celebrate a Failure, A Cultural Shift for Traditional Organizations” Aug 10th, 2016
How do you convince the workforce that we can turn a failure into a win? It is one of the hardest cultural shifts to make for a traditional business that aspires to be world-class. In the past, especially in the United States, identifying a mistake was a poor reflection of one’s own ability or skill. Identifying a coworker’s mistake was the equivalent of being a tattletale on the grade school playground. In contrast, a world-class organization celebrates the identification of failure in order to put measures in place to prevent them from ever happening again.
Why is this so important for a world-class organization? Quite simple, to identify the root cause of a mistake allows the organization to put in place a solution to permanently prevent the mistake from reoccurring. To the world-class organization, all mistakes are waste and some may lead to quality escapes that directly impact their customer.
The trick is putting in preventative measures that are: 1) highly effective, 2) affordable to the organization, and 3) reliable.
Highly Effective – Permanent solution is just that. The organization needs to be sure that the preventative measure works every time and itself does not insert a new potential for mistakes.
Affordable – If you produce handfuls of a product, implementing automated equipment may not be cost justifiable. If you produce thousands per day, the solution should not hamper or delay the process, only mistake-proof it. The solution must make sense to the organization and the industry it serves.
Reliable – The preventative solution itself needs to be bullet proof. If it only works some percent of the time, it is a liability and needs to be improved. If it can potentially wear out, a time or cycle bound inspection, replacement, or a maintenance step needs to be adopted.
Don’t assume commonsense is a permanent solution for fixing a problem. To assure all three of these criteria are met, the preventative measure needs to be tangible.
So give this a try. Start thanking and acknowledging your workforce for identifying mistakes and permanently fixing the processes rather than punishing, embarrassing, or isolating the guilty. Trust me, it won’t be easy, but the benefits will be felt for the long-term.
